Fixing timestamps & location tags in Google Photos

If you use Google Photos, you can adjust the timestamps of photos using its built-in tools. Bear in mind that this will only affect timestamps on photos within Google Photos - it won’t affect photos saved on your hard drive.

On your PC, go to https://photos. google.com in your browser. Next, search for the photos you want to change, then click the tick at the top right-corner of each. You can tick individual photos, or select a group by ticking the first, holding down Shift, then ticking the last.

Next, click the ‘More options’ menu (three vertical dots, top-right - take care to avoid clicking the similar menu button for Chrome just above it), then select ‘Edit date & time’.

You can give all the photos the same time by selecting ‘Set one date & time’, but it’s usually best to choose ‘Shift date & time’. This lets you set a new timestamp for the first (see screenshot), with the rest then following suit in chronological order.

Google Photos also lets you set where each photo was taken. Again, photos taken using your phone will have this location data already embedded (thanks to your smartphone’s GPS), but those taken with a digital camera won’t. By embedding accurate location data in all your photos, you’ll be able to search for pics using their location – for example, Aviemore 2019.

To do this, select your photos as above, but this time choose ‘Edit location’ from the ‘More options’ menu. Type the location you want to apply to the selected image(s) and click the most appropriate location from the list of results.

As with changing timestamps, the location information will only be applied to images in Google Photos, not those on your hard drive.